When was the last time you wrote a letter? Not an e-mail, not a text message stabbed out with two thumbs, not a greeting card with a printed sentiment that you signed your name to, but an honest-to-goodness letter that you wrote on paper with a pen, sealed with a kiss, and mailed?

If you're like most people, you probably handle the bulk of your correspondence electronically these days. Yet chances are you've got a box of letters stashed away that fill your heart with joy every time you dig them out and reread them.

"I keep all my cards, mostly the ones from my husband. Â You keep the ones that make you feel the most special. I got a letter from my sister one time when I was having a hard time, and I kept that one," says Ashley Flood of A Flood of Paper in Wilton. Â

Unlike e-mails, which are often dashed off and trashed just as quickly, people tend to view letters as personal items to be treasured and preserved. Yet about the only handwritten missives that find their way into our mailboxes these days are thank you cards, which Flood says are probably the most popular stationary items she sells.

"When someone texts me or e-mails me a thank you, I don't feel as appreciated as (when I get) a letter, and I think that goes for everyone," Flood says. "It's definitely more personal than an e-mail or a text. I think people just feel special when people get that in the mail box and know someone took the time and was thinking about them."

Letters Are History

Letters may be fading into history, but they've always been one of the best ways to preserve history. For museums, letters from the past penned by people both famous and unknown are an important part of any collection. If it hadn't been for letters, in many cases we'd know very little about the lives of everyday people, particularly women and those from minority groups who weren't represented in the published media of the day.

"I think letters have been absolutely critical in helping unearth the history of the most marginalized," says David Gudelunas, associate professor and chairman of the Department of Communication at Fairfield University. "Women and nonwhite males were barred from public forums (so to) have their words represented, letter-writing becomes that forum. This is not a public space, but they were able to have their voices heard, and later (these letters) are found and it becomes a place of representation for the most marginalized."

Not all letters were private, however. Gudelunas notes that letters written to politicians or letters to the editor were an important part of the public debate. His own book, Confidential to America: Newspaper Advice Columns and Sexual Education, deals with letters that walk the line between the two, because they are written about private topics but intended for a public forum.

"The newspaper advice column is an in-between," says Gudelunas. "Historically people would write to talk about things they weren't comfortable talking about with their closest friends or with their spouse. The irony here is you're writing to the country."

Most people who wrote these letters had little expectation of being published, Gundelunas says, as only a small percentage of the volumes of letters written to newspaper advice columnists ever saw print. Yet the fact that they wrote them suggests also that there's something cathartic about the act of putting pen to paper to write down your most intimate thoughts and sending them out to the world.

"Sitting down with a pen and paper, there's more of a sense of intimacy. When people wrote letters they sat down and thought about what they were going to say before they put pen to paper," says Gudelunas. "Today writing and thinking happens at the same time. In e-mail, there's a lot of editing."

What is Lost, What is Gained

Many people mourn the demise of the letter, yet it doesn't necessarily follow that texts, tweets and e-mails herald the end of meaningful communication.

"I'm a big proponent of the idea that technology doesn't change people, people change technology," says Gudelunas, who sees e-mails as the equivalent of letters and views blogs in much the same way he views those letters to the editor.

"If anything, more people are able to communicate through the written word and we should be happy about this," he says. "It's no longer just a very few educated elite who are writing, and that's not a bad thing."

Gudelunas says people tend to romanticize those red letter days of yore. But while published collections of letters would suggest all of them were beautifully worded and written with an elegant hand, you'll find far more letters in a historical society's collection with random spellings, poor grammar, and quite a few that are the equivalent of a text saying, "send money."

"To put things in perspective, when we think of the glory days of letter writing, a far smaller percentage of the population was literate," Gudelunas says. "We can think about e-mail, twitter and Facebook as democratizing letter writing. It makes sense to me that as more of the population becomes literate we democratize how we communicate, and certainly we see that with e-mail."

And while people are more inclined to see letters as tangible, permanent, and worth saving, e-mails and texts are, if anything, more permanent because they exist forever in the digital world. The biggest difference, Gudelunas says, is that unlike letters, electronic communication is instantaneous.

Some people, however, worry that e-mails, texts and tweets are making us more distant from each other than we were before, and it's easy to see why. How many times have you seen a group of people ostensibly out together, all looking down at their smart phones and texting other people rather than talking to each other?

Certainly, the constant bombardment of text messages can be distracting and many of these quick exchanges aren't particularly meaningful, but in many ways the term "social media" does live up to its name. Electronic communication allows people to stay in touch with many friends and acquaintances that otherwise they would have lost contact with, and that's positive development.

The future of the post office

With fewer people putting pen to paper and stamps to envelopes, however, the days of the postal service as we know it are probably numbered. In August, the U.S. Postal Service announced a $5.2 billion loss for the second quarter, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. In 2010, the Postal Service said it expected to lose $238 billion over the next decade.

The rise of e-mail, text messaging, Skype, and twitter certainly isn't helping the cause. Yet lots of people are still on a mission to save the mail. In 2007, 16 Sparrows, a stationary shop in Chicago, established The Letter Writers Alliance with the express goal of keeping the art of letter writing alive.

"In this era of instantaneous communication, a handwritten letter is a rare and wondrous item. The Letter Writers Alliance is dedicated to preserving this art form; neither long lines, nor late deliveries, nor increasing postal rates will keep us from our mission," reads the organization's mission statement.

Ironically, this international organization is an online entity but, as founders Kathy Zadrozny and Donovan Beeson note on their website, "We aren't anti-email; we are just pro real mail. We use technology to connect letter writers as well as to find letter writing inspiration."

And while it may be true that most people these days rely more on e-mail than they do on "snail mail," it's still much too soon to pronounce letters dead. As Cora Burns, owner of Paper Dolls in Saratoga Springs, notes, not everyone has a computer and parts of the world still exist where the only way reliable way to communicate is with a letter.

"I have a lot of family in the Philippines and a lot of places don't have reliable technology or they lose power. So we write letters to family," she says. "I think there will always be a need for it. I have 15- and 16-year-olds who come in regularly and get personalized stationary, so I don't think it's going to go away any time soon."